Fired up
Museums and galleries breathe new life into their ceramics collections
A collection of throwaway items, including spray-cleaning containers, plastic bottles, soft-drink cans, cartons and takeaway cups, that have been cast in porcelain and covered with paintings of exotic birds and pink flowers, provides clear evidence that the ancient art of ceramics can make bold statements about contemporary life.
The piece, Birds’ Twitter and Fragrance of Flowers, was made by Chinese ceramicist Wan Liya. Recently on display at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, it is one of a number of unique and eye-catching exhibits that are contributing to the exciting new wave of ceramic art that is sweeping across the UK.
Museums and galleries are approaching ceramics from fresh angles, breathing life back into an artform that was frequently relegated to a stairwell or overcrowded cabinet in a lonely corner. Galleries are now being designed in ways that will not only allow institutions to make the most of their existing collections, but also have enough space to exhibit groundbreaking and challenging new work.
One of the most recent examples of this is the £8m refurbishment of the York Art Gallery, including the creation of the Centre of Ceramic Art, comprising two new exhibition spaces, one at mezzanine level within the original Victorian roof and the other above the Madsen Galleries – a suite of three galleries on the ground floor.
Offering a combined exhibition space of 450 sq metres, the galleries will display 2,000 items from York’s 5,000-strong ceramics collection, which spans the 20th century to the present.
The Centre of Ceramic Art opens on 1 August and the curators are fully exploiting the potential of such a large space by putting on a show-stopping exhibition that includes ceramicist Clare Twomey’s latest conceptual work – 10,000 handmade slipcast bowls, signifying the number of hours it takes to become a master of the craft.
The installation embodies a wider aim to showcase the makers, whose efforts tends not to be as celebrated or romanticised as the work of painters and other artists.
“We are trying to position the makers as artists as much as craftspeople, and to show them as people,” says Helen Walsh, the curator of decorative arts at York Art Gallery. “With fine art, people seem to understand that an artist has slaved over a painting, and the artist’s name is as important as the work. With pots you don’t get that as much.”
Walsh is one of a number of curators who believe that getting people interested in the attitudes and perspectives of the makers is a key way of engaging them with the work. The Centre of Ceramic Art’s opening exhibition will also throw the spotlight onto 10 leading potters by displaying their signature works in huge display cases.
The shelves below will be dedicated to the work, objects and people that have influenced and inspired their practice. There are also plans to include pictures of the artists alongside a personal statement about their work.
Walsh will also use the new gallery space to quash preconceptions that studio pottery is an indistinguishable mass of muted earth colours.
A 17-metre-long wall case will be packed with more than 1,000 pots of varying colours, textures and styles, including archaeological pieces, Delftware, Chinese ceramics, medieval jugs, country pottery and factory-produced materials.
“We have been able to create this rainbow of ceramics down one wall,” Walsh says.
Other highlights of the display include the collections of The Very Reverend Dean Milner-White, William Ismay, Henry Rothschild and Anthony Shaw, with works by Bernard Leach, William Staite Murray, Michael Cardew, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper and Felicity Aylieff.
Coming up with new and interesting ways to present ceramic and pottery objects has long been a challenge for curators, with many agreeing that the “cabinet” approach is no longer enough to engage audiences.
Yet many museums and galleries are constrained by space or concerns for security.
Andrew Renton, the head of applied art at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), says that in the past a traditional museum-style display of ceramics was the only option.
“There was potential in the collections that wasn’t being realised,” he says. “A lot of people were being put off by ceramics by virtue of the way we had to show them.”
However, the creation of two contemporary art galleries built at the museum in 2011-12 allowed a break from tradition. A new approach to ceramics is clearly evident in the museum’s Fragile? exhibition (until 4 October), which treats the objects in the same way as modern art.
As its title suggests, the show plays on the fragility of the objects to trigger emotional responses from visitors, who are invited to smash white bone-china tiles underfoot in Twomey’s Consciousness/Conscience, an installation that explores ideas of social convention and appropriateness.
Meanwhile David Cushway’s Fragments – slow-motion footage of a smashing teapot – is played on a loop and Phoebe Cummings’ prehistoric-looking miniature landscapes made from raw clay are viewed through peepholes.
“It was about getting away from the idea that ceramics are either decorative or functional objects,” Renton says. “We wanted to show that they could be something more conceptual, profound, thought-provoking and challenging. We wanted the exhibition to be emotionally engaging, so we thought playing on ideas of fragility, risk and vulnerability would be interesting.”
Meanwhile, Ahead of the Curve: New China from China, which in May concluded the last leg of its UK tour at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, explored the work of contemporary Chinese ceramicists and glass artists who are taking advantage of new opportunities for self-expression.
The exhibition – a collaboration between The Wilson: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, and the Twocities gallery in Shanghai – shows the kind of work that results from the struggle of doing something new in the shadow of a powerful tradition.
There is also the issue of how the work is influenced by eastern and western culture, the latter heavily influencing the teaching in art schools. But the exhibition also pays homage to the historic and contemporary interchange of influences between the UK and China.
Interestingly, the potter Yanze Jiang’s pieces – an assemblage of interlinked cups and teapots – are made in bone china, which was developed in Staffordshire around 1800 as an alternative to porcelain.
“It has come full circle – now there is a Chinese potter using a Staffordshire material,” says Claire Blakey, the curator at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.
Another trend shared by China and the UK is a resurgence of independent makers. In China, the new generation of makers are able to earn a living from their work alone, while in Stoke-on-Trent smaller producers are thriving with the rise of “made-in-
Britain” manufacturers such as Emma Bridgewater, founded in 1985.
It operates from a Victorian factory, and uses techniques that are hundreds of years old.
“People are prepared to pay a bit more for something that is handmade,” Blakey says.
“The products have changed, but the way people are working is quite traditional. In Stoke, there are still some big producers of hotelware, such as Steelite and Dudson, but there are also lots of smaller workshops that the industry has revived, such as Emma Bridgewater. It is going back [in time] a bit to where there were lots of small producers, unlike the 1980s and 1990s when big companies were buying up small factories.”
Ahead of the Curve was inspired by a series of British Council-funded visits in 2009 and 2010 to cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Jingdezhen – China’s equivalent of Stoke-on-Trent, where even the traffic lights are blue and white ceramic masterpieces. It is therefore fitting, says Blakey, that there are plans to take the exhibition – a British interpretation of Chinese work – back to China.
Ceramic objects are traditionally unassuming but they are now being used to tackle issues relating to social justice and politics, and museums and galleries are increasingly exhibiting these works. Confected, Borrowed and Blue, a show at the Bowes Museum in Durham from 14 February to 12 April, showed how blue and white china, often displayed for its decorative qualities, can also be used to create hard-hitting sociopolitical commentary.
Among the standout pieces of artist Paul Scott’s work was Cockle Pickers Tea Service (2007) – a response to the drowning of 23 Chinese workers in Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay in 2004, which depicts water-engulfed landscapes on a different pieces of tableware.
Work by Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry perfectly illustrates how pots – or what he describes as “stealth bombs” – can be used to draw people in before surprising them with an unexpected image or message. The Provincial Punk exhibition, at Turner Contemporary in Margate until 13 September, showcases Perry’s pots, from the earliest pieces he made in the late 1980s to the present day.
Ceramic objects have also been playing a significant role in marking the centenary of the first world war. Perhaps the most notable of these was Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper – an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies that were planted around the moat of the Tower of London.
And, in September, the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent will also include a floral first world war memorial. This will comprise 5,608 white bone china flowers that have been made to commemorate the men from the North Staffordshire Regiment who died between 1914 and 1918.
It is people’s relationship with ceramic objects that make them such powerful markers of time and memory, says Twomey, who is involved in the Memory Makers project, in which Holocaust and genocide survivors will have their stories interpreted by seven artists through a variety of media, including writing, poetry, film, illustration, collage and ceramics.
“We treasure and hold dear beautiful objects, which are a bigger accumulation of things than the objects themselves – people and memories,” Twomey says. “Objects represent so much in our lives.”
The Memory Makers project illustrates how ceramic objects can be used to create connections with transient audiences on a massive scale. On Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, Twomey walked over Westminster Bridge from dawn to dusk handing out 2,000 invitations for people to write down their thoughts on the subject of humanity.
The words will eventually be placed on thousands of porcelain objects, which will then be given back to the public on Westminster Bridge on the same date in 2016.
“This year, we are taking people’s thoughts,” Twomey says, “and next year we’re making other people custodians of those thoughts. It is sort of like a baton for humanity – somebody else’s ideas of how humanity could be in the future.”
Museums that display ceramics are responding to the challenge of creating exhibitions that cater for the interests of niche collectors and the public.
The Bowes Museum in County Durham will be making its collections more accessible this autumn when it reopens its ceramic galleries, which are being refurbished with money from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, set up in 2000 to help venues improve the quality of displays, exhibition spaces and how collections are interpreted.
One of the challenges, says Howard Coutts, the keeper of ceramics at the Bowes Museum, is that the public has a more “muted” response to ceramics predating the 1900s.
“I don’t think the modern generation feels it needs a best tea-set or a best dinner service, and so to some extent people are less interested in what there was from the past,” he says.
“Porcelain is no longer a luxury. The problem with historic collections is getting across a sense of magic and value, not just financial value but cultural value that would have been perceived in any high-end ceramics 100 years ago.
"People can get cheap look-a-likes at a department store for next to nothing. They don’t always realise the skill, design and workmanship that went into these things in the past.”
One way in which the Bowes Museum is addressing this challenge is to split the displays into 12 themes, rather than by type (pottery or porcelain). The themes include French rococo, English neo-classicism, 18th-century dining and Queen Mary II.
New approaches to displaying the objects will include a table layout mounted on a wall and a case for temporary displays, which will be regularly rotated to show off more of the museum’s collection.
An approach based on “less is more” will also free up room for bigger items in the stores, such as a large pottery fish tank (circa 1750) from one of the royal palaces in Portugal.
Not all of the items will be treated as social history objects and areas of the galleries will still be dedicated to the niche interest of collectors, who are likely to search for Wedgwood items, art deco designers such as Clarice Cliff or pieces from the 18th century. Key items here will be presented with more information and comparative material.
The museum is also looking at how more in-depth information can be provided digitally, via an online database or an app.
This autumn, the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent will illustrate how artists and exhibitors of ceramics are exploiting the versatility of the artform.
The festival is centred around the former Spode pottery factory, itself steeped in history as one of the largest potteries in Staffordshire. The event, which takes place from 26 September to 8 November, will primarily explore new approaches to clay and ceramics, showcasing how the artform can create emotional installations, exciting interactive experiences, and work derived from new technologies.
Among the highlights will be a first world war memorial comprising 5,608 white-bone china flowers. This will commemorate men from the North Staffordshire Regiment who died between 1914 and 1918.
Multi-disciplinary artist Bruce McLean will use clay to create a set of theatre characters, while former employees of the industry will be teaching maker Neil Brownsword about traditional practices such as copperplate engraving, mould making, china painting and flower making.
Rapid prototyping and its applications in industry, architecture and design will also be explored. And experimental artist Michael Eden will demonstrate how 3D printing can be used in conjunction with ceramics.
The piece, Birds’ Twitter and Fragrance of Flowers, was made by Chinese ceramicist Wan Liya. Recently on display at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, it is one of a number of unique and eye-catching exhibits that are contributing to the exciting new wave of ceramic art that is sweeping across the UK.
Museums and galleries are approaching ceramics from fresh angles, breathing life back into an artform that was frequently relegated to a stairwell or overcrowded cabinet in a lonely corner. Galleries are now being designed in ways that will not only allow institutions to make the most of their existing collections, but also have enough space to exhibit groundbreaking and challenging new work.
One of the most recent examples of this is the £8m refurbishment of the York Art Gallery, including the creation of the Centre of Ceramic Art, comprising two new exhibition spaces, one at mezzanine level within the original Victorian roof and the other above the Madsen Galleries – a suite of three galleries on the ground floor.
Offering a combined exhibition space of 450 sq metres, the galleries will display 2,000 items from York’s 5,000-strong ceramics collection, which spans the 20th century to the present.
The Centre of Ceramic Art opens on 1 August and the curators are fully exploiting the potential of such a large space by putting on a show-stopping exhibition that includes ceramicist Clare Twomey’s latest conceptual work – 10,000 handmade slipcast bowls, signifying the number of hours it takes to become a master of the craft.
The installation embodies a wider aim to showcase the makers, whose efforts tends not to be as celebrated or romanticised as the work of painters and other artists.
“We are trying to position the makers as artists as much as craftspeople, and to show them as people,” says Helen Walsh, the curator of decorative arts at York Art Gallery. “With fine art, people seem to understand that an artist has slaved over a painting, and the artist’s name is as important as the work. With pots you don’t get that as much.”
Walsh is one of a number of curators who believe that getting people interested in the attitudes and perspectives of the makers is a key way of engaging them with the work. The Centre of Ceramic Art’s opening exhibition will also throw the spotlight onto 10 leading potters by displaying their signature works in huge display cases.
The shelves below will be dedicated to the work, objects and people that have influenced and inspired their practice. There are also plans to include pictures of the artists alongside a personal statement about their work.
Walsh will also use the new gallery space to quash preconceptions that studio pottery is an indistinguishable mass of muted earth colours.
A 17-metre-long wall case will be packed with more than 1,000 pots of varying colours, textures and styles, including archaeological pieces, Delftware, Chinese ceramics, medieval jugs, country pottery and factory-produced materials.
“We have been able to create this rainbow of ceramics down one wall,” Walsh says.
Other highlights of the display include the collections of The Very Reverend Dean Milner-White, William Ismay, Henry Rothschild and Anthony Shaw, with works by Bernard Leach, William Staite Murray, Michael Cardew, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper and Felicity Aylieff.
Coming up with new and interesting ways to present ceramic and pottery objects has long been a challenge for curators, with many agreeing that the “cabinet” approach is no longer enough to engage audiences.
Yet many museums and galleries are constrained by space or concerns for security.
Andrew Renton, the head of applied art at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales), says that in the past a traditional museum-style display of ceramics was the only option.
“There was potential in the collections that wasn’t being realised,” he says. “A lot of people were being put off by ceramics by virtue of the way we had to show them.”
However, the creation of two contemporary art galleries built at the museum in 2011-12 allowed a break from tradition. A new approach to ceramics is clearly evident in the museum’s Fragile? exhibition (until 4 October), which treats the objects in the same way as modern art.
As its title suggests, the show plays on the fragility of the objects to trigger emotional responses from visitors, who are invited to smash white bone-china tiles underfoot in Twomey’s Consciousness/Conscience, an installation that explores ideas of social convention and appropriateness.
Meanwhile David Cushway’s Fragments – slow-motion footage of a smashing teapot – is played on a loop and Phoebe Cummings’ prehistoric-looking miniature landscapes made from raw clay are viewed through peepholes.
“It was about getting away from the idea that ceramics are either decorative or functional objects,” Renton says. “We wanted to show that they could be something more conceptual, profound, thought-provoking and challenging. We wanted the exhibition to be emotionally engaging, so we thought playing on ideas of fragility, risk and vulnerability would be interesting.”
Meanwhile, Ahead of the Curve: New China from China, which in May concluded the last leg of its UK tour at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, explored the work of contemporary Chinese ceramicists and glass artists who are taking advantage of new opportunities for self-expression.
The exhibition – a collaboration between The Wilson: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, and the Twocities gallery in Shanghai – shows the kind of work that results from the struggle of doing something new in the shadow of a powerful tradition.
There is also the issue of how the work is influenced by eastern and western culture, the latter heavily influencing the teaching in art schools. But the exhibition also pays homage to the historic and contemporary interchange of influences between the UK and China.
Interestingly, the potter Yanze Jiang’s pieces – an assemblage of interlinked cups and teapots – are made in bone china, which was developed in Staffordshire around 1800 as an alternative to porcelain.
“It has come full circle – now there is a Chinese potter using a Staffordshire material,” says Claire Blakey, the curator at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.
Another trend shared by China and the UK is a resurgence of independent makers. In China, the new generation of makers are able to earn a living from their work alone, while in Stoke-on-Trent smaller producers are thriving with the rise of “made-in-
Britain” manufacturers such as Emma Bridgewater, founded in 1985.
It operates from a Victorian factory, and uses techniques that are hundreds of years old.
“People are prepared to pay a bit more for something that is handmade,” Blakey says.
“The products have changed, but the way people are working is quite traditional. In Stoke, there are still some big producers of hotelware, such as Steelite and Dudson, but there are also lots of smaller workshops that the industry has revived, such as Emma Bridgewater. It is going back [in time] a bit to where there were lots of small producers, unlike the 1980s and 1990s when big companies were buying up small factories.”
Ahead of the Curve was inspired by a series of British Council-funded visits in 2009 and 2010 to cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Jingdezhen – China’s equivalent of Stoke-on-Trent, where even the traffic lights are blue and white ceramic masterpieces. It is therefore fitting, says Blakey, that there are plans to take the exhibition – a British interpretation of Chinese work – back to China.
Ceramic objects are traditionally unassuming but they are now being used to tackle issues relating to social justice and politics, and museums and galleries are increasingly exhibiting these works. Confected, Borrowed and Blue, a show at the Bowes Museum in Durham from 14 February to 12 April, showed how blue and white china, often displayed for its decorative qualities, can also be used to create hard-hitting sociopolitical commentary.
Among the standout pieces of artist Paul Scott’s work was Cockle Pickers Tea Service (2007) – a response to the drowning of 23 Chinese workers in Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay in 2004, which depicts water-engulfed landscapes on a different pieces of tableware.
Work by Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry perfectly illustrates how pots – or what he describes as “stealth bombs” – can be used to draw people in before surprising them with an unexpected image or message. The Provincial Punk exhibition, at Turner Contemporary in Margate until 13 September, showcases Perry’s pots, from the earliest pieces he made in the late 1980s to the present day.
Ceramic objects have also been playing a significant role in marking the centenary of the first world war. Perhaps the most notable of these was Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper – an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies that were planted around the moat of the Tower of London.
And, in September, the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent will also include a floral first world war memorial. This will comprise 5,608 white bone china flowers that have been made to commemorate the men from the North Staffordshire Regiment who died between 1914 and 1918.
It is people’s relationship with ceramic objects that make them such powerful markers of time and memory, says Twomey, who is involved in the Memory Makers project, in which Holocaust and genocide survivors will have their stories interpreted by seven artists through a variety of media, including writing, poetry, film, illustration, collage and ceramics.
“We treasure and hold dear beautiful objects, which are a bigger accumulation of things than the objects themselves – people and memories,” Twomey says. “Objects represent so much in our lives.”
The Memory Makers project illustrates how ceramic objects can be used to create connections with transient audiences on a massive scale. On Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, Twomey walked over Westminster Bridge from dawn to dusk handing out 2,000 invitations for people to write down their thoughts on the subject of humanity.
The words will eventually be placed on thousands of porcelain objects, which will then be given back to the public on Westminster Bridge on the same date in 2016.
“This year, we are taking people’s thoughts,” Twomey says, “and next year we’re making other people custodians of those thoughts. It is sort of like a baton for humanity – somebody else’s ideas of how humanity could be in the future.”
A tale of two audiences
Museums that display ceramics are responding to the challenge of creating exhibitions that cater for the interests of niche collectors and the public.
The Bowes Museum in County Durham will be making its collections more accessible this autumn when it reopens its ceramic galleries, which are being refurbished with money from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, set up in 2000 to help venues improve the quality of displays, exhibition spaces and how collections are interpreted.
One of the challenges, says Howard Coutts, the keeper of ceramics at the Bowes Museum, is that the public has a more “muted” response to ceramics predating the 1900s.
“I don’t think the modern generation feels it needs a best tea-set or a best dinner service, and so to some extent people are less interested in what there was from the past,” he says.
“Porcelain is no longer a luxury. The problem with historic collections is getting across a sense of magic and value, not just financial value but cultural value that would have been perceived in any high-end ceramics 100 years ago.
"People can get cheap look-a-likes at a department store for next to nothing. They don’t always realise the skill, design and workmanship that went into these things in the past.”
One way in which the Bowes Museum is addressing this challenge is to split the displays into 12 themes, rather than by type (pottery or porcelain). The themes include French rococo, English neo-classicism, 18th-century dining and Queen Mary II.
New approaches to displaying the objects will include a table layout mounted on a wall and a case for temporary displays, which will be regularly rotated to show off more of the museum’s collection.
An approach based on “less is more” will also free up room for bigger items in the stores, such as a large pottery fish tank (circa 1750) from one of the royal palaces in Portugal.
Not all of the items will be treated as social history objects and areas of the galleries will still be dedicated to the niche interest of collectors, who are likely to search for Wedgwood items, art deco designers such as Clarice Cliff or pieces from the 18th century. Key items here will be presented with more information and comparative material.
The museum is also looking at how more in-depth information can be provided digitally, via an online database or an app.
British Ceramics Biennial
This autumn, the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent will illustrate how artists and exhibitors of ceramics are exploiting the versatility of the artform.
The festival is centred around the former Spode pottery factory, itself steeped in history as one of the largest potteries in Staffordshire. The event, which takes place from 26 September to 8 November, will primarily explore new approaches to clay and ceramics, showcasing how the artform can create emotional installations, exciting interactive experiences, and work derived from new technologies.
Among the highlights will be a first world war memorial comprising 5,608 white-bone china flowers. This will commemorate men from the North Staffordshire Regiment who died between 1914 and 1918.
Multi-disciplinary artist Bruce McLean will use clay to create a set of theatre characters, while former employees of the industry will be teaching maker Neil Brownsword about traditional practices such as copperplate engraving, mould making, china painting and flower making.
Rapid prototyping and its applications in industry, architecture and design will also be explored. And experimental artist Michael Eden will demonstrate how 3D printing can be used in conjunction with ceramics.